Talk:Rules of chess

Rules of chess has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

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Date	Process	Result
July 18, 2007	Articles for deletion	Kept
October 20, 2008	Good article nominee	Listed

Current status: Good article

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Ordered lists

I notice that while the ordered lists display fine in Opera 5.12, in Internet Explorer 5.50 the numbers are simply omitted. It must have something to do with the left-aligned tables. Does anyone have any insight into this problem? --Fritzlein

Time - needs improvment to article

Visited this page to try to get an idea of different typical time controls clubs and tournaments use. Yes I know it varies, but an indication would be informative.

Dead Position

For the dead position section in the "End of the game" section, isn't king vs. king and two knights drawn? Piequals3point14159 (talk) 02:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No, there are legal sequences of moves that can lead to checkmate. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 03:07, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Although the side with the two knights cannot force checkmate, they can give mate if the opponent plays badly. So this is not a dead position.

Another way to think about it is to say that a position is dead if the two players can't cooperate to get either player mated.

(As for the question you actually asked: under FIDE Laws and USCF Rules, it's not an automatic draw. If the side with the lone king runs out of time, then FIDE usually rules it as a win (6.9) and USCF usually rules it as a draw (14E3).) Edderiofer (talk) 15:28, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What is the rule of chess

How do I play chess 2600:100D:B04E:36CF:3DD3:765C:A7AB:F7E0 (talk) 21:35, 16 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Types of dead position

The article states, "There are two kinds of dead position:". This statement would generally be understood to mean that every dead position can be categorized into exactly one of the mentioned types. However, the two mentioned types are "has a piece combination that the USCF specifically mentions as constituting insufficient material" and "has a piece combination that could be used to form a non-dead position", and those types overlap at "has king and some-color-squared bishop against king and same-color-squared bishop". In my opinion, it'd make a lot more sense for the two types to be "has a piece combination that could be used to form a non-dead position" and "has a piece combination that could not be used to form a non-dead position". ISaveNewspapers (talk) 22:18, 11 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The double negative in your suggested rewrite defeats easy comprehension, IMO. --IHTS (talk) 22:37, 11 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Seconded, pedantry does not improve articles. FIDE rules do not refer to "insufficient material" or otherwise distinguish between types of dead positions. The only reason to list the piece combinations and distinguish it from blocked positions is explanatory, so we definitely don't need to complicate the wording. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 01:28, 12 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The classification is not even complete. It is possible to have positions that are dead because of a forced stalemate or forced insufficient material, but that currently have legal forward play or sufficient material. Double sharp (talk) 14:21, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mean that's literally the exact way I want it to be worded; I was just conveying the idea. How about this: "positions where no arrangement of material would allow for mate" and "positions where material could be arranged to allow for mate, but no such arrangement can be reached." ISaveNewspapers (talk) 20:23, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

James Congdon vs Eugene Delmar, 1880

	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h
8									8
7									7
6									6
5									5
4									4
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h

Dead position after 44.Qg8+!

I know what you mean by the second, but it just seems very confusing. If we must make a division, I suggest we follow Andrew Buchanan's classification (composer of many problems hinging on the dead-position rule): positions whose "cause of death" has to do with (1) insufficient material, (2) stalemate, or (3) blockage. For the second, consider the diagram; Black is forced to give stalemate, so the position is dead. But it's not actually a stalemate on the board. Of course, in 1880 there wasn't yet a dead position rule, so 44...Kxg8 was played. Although I suppose stalemates are vacuously dead positions, where no sequence of legal moves can lead to checkmate because there aren't any legal moves at all (so such a sequence could only be of length zero) and the position on the board is not a checkmate (ruling out the length-zero sequence of moves). Technically this is still not everything possible: in theory one could have a position that is dead because either insufficient material or stalemate must result, but one can choose which. But at least that covers all the major reasons. Double sharp (talk) 20:29, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The edit I initially made was just to remove the "king and bishop against king and bishop with bishops on the same color" bullet point; I imagine that the resulting version of the section would be easy to understand to most people. Of course, when my edit was reverted, the reason provided in the reversion's edit summary had nothing to do with that; per the edit summary, my edit was reverted due to an inconsistency with the USCF rules. The problem here is that this article and the USCF rules seem to be referring to different things in the first place. Indeed, the USCF rules classify every dead position as a position with "insufficient material"; the listed position types ("king against king", "king against king and minor piece", and "king and bishop against king and bishop with bishops on the same square color") seem only to serve as examples of such. ISaveNewspapers (talk) 20:53, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The FIDE rules define "dead position" (5.2.2). The USCF rules do not. If we are going to define that term, it should be a quotation or a direct paraphrase of the FIDE definition. We should not be blazing new trails in defining terms.

On the other hand, the USCF rules define "insufficient material to continue", and "insufficient material to win on time", while the FIDE rules do not. In 14D, the rules give four cases of insufficient material to continue, but the fourth case is a catch-all, which includes the first three among others.

Generally speaking, we should be hewing closely to both the FIDE and the USCF rules, and of course, mentioning where they differ. That's not easy to do here, but we should try. Bruce leverett (talk) 21:31, 15 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]